Not pointless, just slightly more effort than the average illiterate apparently wants to put in. :-p (Really, there are useful distinctions between words that make it worth preserving most of these rules, including the purely grammatical ones. It's probably a losing war against apathy and ignorance - there was a frustrating flamewar recently on a friend's LJ about the use of the word 'ignorant', usefully illustrating most of the commenters' ignorance in the process; none of them is stupid, by a long way, but apparently they can't tell the difference between ignorance and stupidity thanks to their usual imprecise use of either word. They're not synonyms!

But because lazy use 'skunks' (http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Alt/alt.usage.english/2005-07/msg00358.html) certain words, we then have to use 5 words to explain a concept where 1 word previously did the job neatly. It's worth railing against bad usage in general to avoid such rubbish.